Bees: 5 Things You Didn't Know

For the last few years, the honeybee population has been declining at a rapid pace. While this population drop lessens the chances that you'll get stung by one, it also reduces the chances that many of the 90 or so North American crops they pollinate annually will develop. Bees aren't the only pollinators, but they do the bulk of the work, and the foods harvested as a result have an estimated annual value of about $15 billion. An often-cited fact is that about a third of the human diet comes from plants pollinated by bees. Their disappearing act — blamed on everything from pesticides to parasites and referred to as colony collapse disorder — is, therefore, alarming, and it has the attention of researchers around the world.

1- Humans can endure about eight bee stings per pound of body weight

The first thing you didn't know about bees is that the bigger you are, the better your chances of surviving multiple Africanized bee stings.

According to entomologists from Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Center, there is a “lethal dose” of bee venom for people in otherwise good health. The lethal dose can be determined by body weight: the limit is approximately 8.6 bee stings per pound of body weight. This means that a healthy 180-pound male can endure about 1,500 stings before reaching the lethal amount.

2- Bees survive by shivering

Contrary to popular belief, bees don't make it through the winter hibernating like bears do. Instead, they huddle together and shiver. This group shivering not only keeps them alive during the cold winter months, but it's also known to create an enormous amount of heat. No one knows this better than the Asian giant hornet, a massive predator and bee-killer extraordinaire; just one Asian giant hornet, being five times bigger than a bee, can behead 30 or 40 of them every minute, meaning a small group can decimate a hive of several thousand bees.

Japanese honey bees fight back by "balling." They surround the hornet and start heating things up by beating their wings and shivering. The result is a temperature that reaches 117F, just enough to cook the hornet to death.